Post-Charleston Sermon

      

          ”Who then is this?” indeed!  A man who cures leprosy with a touch; who casts out demons, and calms the sea just by speaking to it?  It is a pity, but as modern readers of the ancient text, we often miss out on a lot that the gospel writers wanted us to know and to think about.  Indeed, in first century Judea all of these things - all of these miraculous powers - screamed of Jesus’ inherent divinity.  To a Jew, Leprosy was the worst of all possible curses: a punishment for sin that was literally living death.  As ruler over both life and death, it was believed that only God could bestow leprosy and therefore only God could cure it.  So when Luke describes Jesus as healing 10 lepers and then proclaiming to the crowds “Did only this Samaritan come back to give thanks to God?”, it is not on only a challenge to the people’s views about Samaria, but it’s also a challenge to recognize and accept Jesus’ true nature.

            And the fact is the Gospels are literally filled with these kinds of references to Jesus’ divinity.  Despite modern beliefs that ancient people were superstitious and stupid folk - believers of literally anything up to and including that miracles happened all the time - the surprising reality is that we find rather the reverse.  Many Jews of this era thought the age of miracles was behind them, and what few wonderworkers they believed were real weren’t really how we would envision them.  People like Hanina Ben Dosa and Honi the Circle Drawer didn’t really perform acts of power, they were what we would think of as just really effective at Prayer.  Much like today, yes we find the ancient world had its version of Palm readers and weavers of magic spells, but in all of ancient history the miracles ascribed to Jesus are singularly unique.  Then as today if somebody walked around our cities and towns, bringing sight to the blind and making the infirm stand up with a command, the people would not ask just “Who are you,” but “WHAT are you”. 

            As such, you can imagine my confusion when I heard a former pastor of mine said that the real Jesus was just a human being, that his divinity was manufactured centuries later and of the four gospels only John ascribes any divinity to Jesus at all.  As I was interning at a very progressive Church, It didn’t shock me that they thought that way, I simply found it tragic.  I found it tragic that even Christian clergy could know their own books so poorly.  So when Mark writes “Who is this that calms the seas with his very voice?” What on earth or in heaven could create order out of chaos with but a word?”, well, rest assured he had one Being and one Being only in mind.

            I say all this to you because I want to talk to you about the power of Jesus, and to talk to you about the power of Jesus I first need to make that power very real to you.  When the earliest Christians quote stories from Jesus’ life, it is from these gospels.  When the earliest Christians were martyred for their faith, it was over what was in these books.  We live centuries apart from the founders of our country do we not?  Even today, we would know whether George Washington was real or a  myth.  Even today, if somebody ascribed miraculous abilities to Thomas Jefferson, we would know whether or not it was true.  If these stories were false, we might laugh at them, but we certainly wouldn’t die for them.  And yet that is exactly what our Christian forbears did for the Jesus in our gospels.

Now why is this important?  Why do we need to understand Jesus’ power as real?  Because I need you to take it seriously.  I need you to take Jesus’ power seriously because we all need to take Jesus’ use of power very, very seriously.  That God became a human being and had the power to shape the very elements of creation itself and that He would sooner die a criminal’s death before using that power on another human being, this needs to be central to our Beliefs as Christians…and it’s not.

            In America, we have an addiction to power.  No, not an addiction, we are having an adulterous affair with it.  We chase endlessly after wealth, fame, and political office.  We say to ourselves as Christians if I only I can get my hands on more money, if only I were famous, if only I had a title that would make people do what I say life would be better.  Brothers and sisters, how can this be? 

Now, there is nothing wrong with these things in and of themselves.  There is nothing inherently evil with having money, there is nothing bad about being famous or holding political office.  Jesus’ life shows us that Power does indeed have a godly place, my complaint is as Americans we have absolutely no wish to find out what that place is.  We want so desperately to keep our myths that somehow power solves our problems, but the fact is it doesn’t.

            If you need proof that we do this, I can only point you to how we as a society accomplish everything.  We punish.   An out-of-work single mother thrown in jail because she couldn’t find babysitting while she went to an interview, a man thrown into jail for legally marrying his 16 year old wife because of a poorly worded statutory rape law, a twenty year old walks into a South Carolina church with a gun, we continue to believe that having power over another human being no matter the circumstances somehow magically makes the world a better place.   But it doesn’t. 

We value power to the point of insanity.  We indoctrinate our kids to value strength, to be strong and never to be pushed around - but we are outraged to find children get bullied to the point of suicide.  We insist on our rights, we demand not to have our time infringed upon, so much so that every time when see our spouses once work is done, we blow up and make all these ultimatums about their behavior -  And when our spouses finally won’t see us anymore , we have the gall to ask why.  This obsession with power, this need to force other people to do what we want even goes to the very core of the way we do religion.  When Craig (our pastoral associate) gave his sermon last Sunday, he called out our Bible Publishers and our Bible Commentators for not translating what was actually there and let me tell you I applaud him.  As a seminary graduate, I can’t emphasize enough how important a job our Bible translators have and yet despite this there is next to no accountability for what they print.  The publishers have learned how to sell Bibles and what sells Bibles to our American Culture is to fill it with words like “Obey” even when the text clearly doesn’t call for it.  Because homosexuality is such a hot topic, they make sure put in verses decrying it when anyone fluent in the language knows differently, and finally to sell Bibles they make sure to twist as much as possible to talk about the end times even to the point of ridiculousness.  Many Christians believe in a Rapture, the taking up of all true believers before God punishes indiscriminately everyone else.  Whether you believe in it yourself or not we need to realize that belief in the Rapture is very recent.  17 centuries passed in the common era before any Christian believed in the Rapture, almost two millennia of Believers pouring over the same Scriptures we have today and yet not one of them ever believed in it.  Yet we find it in our Bibles today don’t we?  Well, in actuality maybe we aren’t pouring over the same Scriptures after all.

            But this is who we are as a culture.  Publishers learned long ago what makes Americans buy Bibles and that is simply to make a product that helps us lord it over our neighbor. Bible’s that let us thrust our fingers into its pages to tell the other person to obey, Bibles that let us critique and discriminate against how God made them to be, Bibles that let us envision a world where God finally kills everybody but us.  It…has…to…stop.

            After spending two years in a very liberal church, I know I don’t agree with much of their theology, but they do have one thing over the rest of us.  A fair critique they have is that more conservative theologies make Christ into a cog, nothing but a wheel in some grand inexplicable scheme of salvation.  In Liberal Theology Christ is an example to live by.  They don’t just pour over his words looking for something that might be a command, they try to see what he was doing and the example he wanted to set.  In our gospel story for today, Power is Jesus’ last resort – not his first.  In the middle of the storm, even when it was at its worst, even when the boat was flooding and about to be capsized, he decided endurance and faith in the Father were far better choices than to simply command the world to do his bidding.  Indeed, if it were up to him he would not have used power at all.  But when the disciples cried out to him, in their panic and on the verge of their utter despair, it is then that Jesus calms the seas and brings order to the chaos of that moment.  Even then, however, it was power used for God’s children, not against, and indeed afterward Jesus still proclaims that faith was still the better option of the two.

            Power, you see does not accomplish what we think it does, and when I hear atheists from our culture scoff… when even they think so much of Force and Violence that they ask “how can you believe in an all-powerful God when there is so much evil in the world,” my answer to them is why do you think that power accomplishes anything?  A stone thrown violently into a pond brings the water down for second, but in the end the stone just sinks out of sight and the consequences of our actions end up rippling everywhere else, including back to us.   If history has taught us anything, it is that bullets and bludgeons do little to change men’s minds and forcing others to be good people in fact has never once made them into good people.  Indeed, if the goal is to create a better world to live in, Peace and Perseverance prove far better, and taking a bullet instead of spending one is a far more incredible show of strength.

            So what are we to do?  How can we, tiny and insignificant as we are, remotely take on the incredible violence and ugliness of our world?  The first step is we stop pretending it is the big and powerful things that matter.  Every big thing happens because of a multiplicity of small things.  It is the consistent little choices that build up to the evil or the good that we do.  And in that vein we come to step 2: If we are to change the little things, we must change our attitudes that are turning the little things bad.  We must do things like control our worry.  Our worries and our frets make mountains out of molehills, it makes us focus on ourselves rather than actually solving the problem.  God sees our situation and has already provided a way out of it.  Worrying about it only makes our responses to the situation selfish and poorly thought.  Worry makes us into ugly people and ugly people make ugly decisions. 

But we must not only control our worry, we must not only keep constant vigilance over our fears, we must also stop our blaming.  When we worry, when we give into our fears, we automatically concoct a reason for those fears and those reasons are usually anything but reasonable.  We saw the results of this in Charleston South Carolina, where a young man who worried that despite that white people were ¾ of the population and that we constitute 90% of the people in political office, he still felt that his race was somehow in jeopardy.  And because he believed his race was in danger he decided the only option was to shoot people praying in a church, and now 9 of our brothers and sisters have been taken away.  Parents will no longer have their children, and their children will no longer have their parents.  I am sure we don’t have the full story, in fact I am absolutely convinced that we don’t have the full story, but what I can tell you no matter the state of his mind that one act of hate will now create chances for thousands more, and that is what brings us to our final step.  We need to be involved. 

After living less than 40 years on this planet, I can tell you these tragedies have one thing in common.  Very, Very rarely are plots like this kept so secret that nobody could have truly stopped it.  We live in a society that is so apathetic to violence we have to tell our young women to yell fire when they are being assaulted, because that’s the only thing that makes us pay attention.  Jesus did not hide away his entire career, he lived amongst the people – it is why he is called Emmanuel: God with us.  He comforted and protected the wounded in his midst and He challenged the powerful that did the wounding.  He brought healing to the desperate and peacefully brought the ridiculousness of His enemies back on their own heads.  We need to learn to do the same.   Like Jesus we need to learn to have faith instead of fear, we need to learn to craft solutions instead of making people into the problem.  People will be the problem all on their own, believe me we don’t need to do it for them.  Finally, we must realize the teachings of Christ are worthless unless they are embodied.  We, too must live amongst the people and we must be the power of Christ in a world that so desperately needs it.  May we do so lovingly and in Christ’s Name.  Amen.

  

           

The Disturbing Trouble of a Flawless Theology

Back in Seminary, one of my former classmates related a story of a mother who made the local news by killing herself and her three children.  A suicide note left at home detailed her reasoning quite explicitly.  The purpose of this tragic decision?  She did it to save her children’s souls.  Children below a certain age cannot sin, they lack the maturity and knowledge to fully comprehend their actions, so rather than risking her children losing their faith she killed them so they would never risk the eternal torment of hell.  Because it is a sin to murder however, and the Bible says all murderers should be put to death, but that murderers can be saved too if they repent, the answer to her was clear.  She would drown them all and she would repent in the waters of this new “baptism”.  As a loving mother it was the only right thing to do.

            Now, I have no idea what this woman suffered from.  Post-Partem could be a culprit, maybe she was abused by a religious person – on this side of the tragedy there is simply very little left to us to understand.  I will, however, mimic my esteemed classmates astonished reply, “Her evangelical theology was flawless”.  The truly scary thing about that story to any clergy-member of conscience is the fact she might not have had any mental illness at all.  That in the end she simply could have, honestly and faithfully, followed the tenets of her religion to their only logical conclusion is just as likely a possibility.

            When I read this article, “8 Steps to confront your wife’s sexual refusal,” (found here http://biblicalgenderroles.com/2015/05/23/8-steps-to-confront-your-wifes-sexual-refusal/), that is the exact thing I am reminded of.  After reading the article in its entirety, which I recommend the reader here to do the same before continuing, the first thing that came to my mind is that this man’s evangelical theology, a theology that says men have a “right” to sex from their women “even if she is grudging about giving it”, is similarly just as flawless.  From an Evangelical Biblically Inerrant point of view, God wrote Scripture and since God wrote Scripture to be plainly understood, any command within Scripture clearly included in the New Covenant needs to be understood as a command of God.  Context and qualifiers are to be avoided, as any variation from the Scripture’s “plain meaning” is sin trying to work its way into your interpretation of Scripture.  So, strictly speaking, he is absolutely correct.  The scripture plainly says that women should not deny their husband’s sex, going against Scripture is sin, and as “sin” the husband has a right, no, A DUTY to drag his  marital sex squabbles in front of the congregation and the congregation must in turn demand her repentance or expel her. – and that’s what horrifying.

              Now, as a trained and educated clergy person, I would point out that 99.999% of Evangelicals don’t bring their theology to this conclusion.  Technically the only medicine allowed in Scripture is to “stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses” (1 Timothy 5:23), and scripture is quite clear that the proper response to someone being ill is to call the church elders to pray over them (James 5:14).  With that said, very, very few see going to the Doctor or taking Pepto-Bismal as being unfaithful to God, even though strictly speaking those options aren’t found in the Bible.  They do this because, quite rightly, they understand that the author never intended those consequences.  When Paul wrote to Timothy he was expressing a loving concern for his protégé’s health and was not commanding everyone for all time to cure their stomach aches with fermented grape juice.  When James wrote that the faithful should pray over their sick there is no intimation that it should be done instead of medical help.  Indeed, in the ancient world as now, that if reasonable medical means exist to treat an affliction it was understood that they should be used – it’s why Paul feels free to tell Timothy to have wine for that stomach ache in the first place.

            

 Likewise for the Scripture the author uses for his argument. 

“Now in response to the matters you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have relations with a woman.”² But because sexual immorality is so common, each man should have his own wife, and each woman should have her own husband. ³ A husband should fulfill his marital responsibility to his wife, and likewise a wife to her husband. ⁴ A wife does not have the right over her own body, but her husband does. In the same way, a husband does not have the right over his own body, but his wife does. ⁵ Do not deprive one another sexually—except when you agree for a time, to devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again; otherwise, Satan may tempt you because of your lack of self-control. ⁶ I say the following as a concession, not as a command. ⁷ I wish that all people were just like me. But each has his own gift from God, one person in this way and another in that way.” – I Corinthians 7:1-7(HCSB)(emphasis his)

            Any normal person would read this Scripture and see that Paul is acting as a pastor to his congregation and giving marital advice.  That he is not giving a command for all time and all people (or even Corinthian people) is obvious from the passage itself.  Indeed, Paul never calls such sexual denial sin, rather any congregation could see that if you deny your spouse sex you can expect a pretty miserable marriage and the problem will eventually fix itself, one way or another, without need of further congregational involvement. 

            The problem is the author answers this, too, and again his evangelical theology is flawless. 

His concession (or opinion) is about celibacy. He is prefacing the statement he is about to make as his opinion – that he wished everyone could be celibate like he was as there are many advantages to serving God as a single person. But he realizes that celibacy is a gift God has only given to a chosen few, while the rest of men and women ought to marry.

What he is stating in this passage is, if you don’t have the gift of celibacy and you do get married, you have a solemn obligation to have sex with your spouse, you cannot deny them unless it is mutually agreed by both of you for a short period of time.

Now I can disagree with this, and in fact I do, but the problem is I have to leave Evangelical Interpretation to do it.  As a man educated in the history and language of the Scriptures, I can tell you Corinth wasn’t exactly a den of chastity and self-control – so much so that the Corinthian Church had a member within it who was married to one of his father’s wives (1 Cor. 5:1) and the church was okay with it.  Sexual immorality was a problem within this church, which is why Paul touches on the subject not only in 7:2, but 5:1, 6:13, 6:18, and finally also in 10:8.  This rather loose environ is why he refers to sexual immorality “being so common” and also refers to their “lack of self-control” concerning it.  Because of its commonality, Paul reinforces the marital relationship as an appropriate outlet in his response to the Corinthian church’s questions, but Paul’s point is hardly that he wants people to be celibate - he wants his congregation to learn to keep it zipped!  Not only this, but it should also be added that the author is also picking and choosing his Bible translations.  Verse 7:6 in the Greek simply says, “but I say this as a concession, not a command.”  He is deliberately picking a translation that plays to his interpretation, which is why he picks from only one of the two possible English translations that includes the phrase “the following” or least its idea.

However, all this would mean very little to a number of those on the right.  You may choose whatever Bible you wish and it counts just as much as God’s Inerrant and Infallible Word as any other, no matter how it would disagree with other translations.  You can pick the Bible that plays to your own petty biases all you want.  Indeed, not only do you get to choose whatever you want to be “God’s Word”, you get to refer to anyone who calls you out on this fact as “liberal” and “Non-Bible-Believing.” So not only can we not refute him by showing him different Bible translations (or, heaven forbid, get him to actually learn Biblical Greek), but I can’t even do so by pointing out that his preferred translation is highly out of historical context.   I have to point to “flawed and sinful human knowledge” as opposed to his “Perfect Word” for that.    

            And this ultimately is what is the most disturbing.  This man’s Evangelical and Conservative Theology is so closed, so circular, so indelibly flawed (The Bible is God’s Word and must be obeyed, I have chosen the verse I prefer in the Bible I prefer, by obeying that verse I am obeying God) that it is literally impossible to show this man how wrong and how damaging he is being.  His theology has so disconnected him from reality he honestly can say in one sentence “A husband ought not to feel guilty for having sex with his wife when she is not in the mood if she yields, even grudgingly “ and say he does not condone rape in another.  He honestly thinks that dragging their sex lives in front of the church, doing no extra work on the house, and “removing her funding” doesn’t amount to passive-aggressive manipulation on the husband’s part, but that it is all inherently tied up to the duties of the male under the doctrine of “Biblical Headship.”  He has even gotten himself to the point where he can call people "haters" who point out that his advice violates domestic violence laws!

“For all of the “Rape Accusers” out there, especially the ones that are hurling applications of domestic violence laws at me – I have written a special post just for you.”(emphasis mine)

            Just like the woman who killed herself and her children, this man’s Religious Right Theology is incredibly harmful and destructive.  His advice, unlike Paul’s, is going to get a number of men nothing but a lost house and alimony garnishments at best;  prison and a lifetime of obeying sex offender reporting requirements at worst.  WE AS CHRISTIANS OF GOOD CONSCIENCE NEED TO OWN THIS.  We let Christian theology reach a point where literally any fool with a Bible translation gets to speak for God.  This man has no theological training, no understanding of human psychology, no time spent as a pastor and yet his beliefs not only allow him to wear those mantles but compel the vulnerable to trust him for no other reason that he sprinkles choice Bible verses throughout his website.  American Theology has created monsters and real people are going to be hurt by it.  It’s time we all sat down and had real honest conversation about the kinds of believers we are making, and the discussion needs to happen yesterday.